


Dying Light

by jcporter1



Category: Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Angst, Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-28
Updated: 2012-12-28
Packaged: 2017-11-22 18:03:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/612666
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jcporter1/pseuds/jcporter1
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A reimagining of His Last Bow. Watson wonders why Holmes doesn't invite him to ride out the war together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dying Light

 

**Dying Light - A reimagining of His Last Bow**

**jcporter1**

 

 

“’As to you Watson, stand with me here upon the terrace, for it may be the last quiet talk that we shall ever have.’ 

 

The two friends chatted in intimate converse for a few minutes, recalling once again the days of the past.  As they turned to the car Holmes pointed back to the moonlit sea and shook a thoughtful head.

 

‘There’s an east wind coming, Watson.’

 

‘I think not, Holmes.  It is very warm.’

 

‘Good old Watson!  You are the one fixed point in a changing age.’”

 

Watson set his pen down for good. One last time. He fingered the sheaf of papers, lining them up neatly, tapping back in  any sheet that stuck out from the stack, and crisply slid the lot into the oversized envelope already addressed and stamped.

He lay it with some reverence on the stack of out going mail. The act left him feeling hollow.

 

As hollow as the car ride back to London to turn over Von Bork. When his heart was in his throat and he only wanted to blurt out in a thousand different ways the same question:

 

"Why don't you want me?”

 

Yet he dared not.  Instead he drove on. Holmes, smoking beside him, was of course wonderful; regaling him with his close scrapes in America. The gangsters he outwitted.  The member of the royal family (whom he couldn't name for being sworn to secrecy) who begged him to come out of retirement. The saloon girls and Atlantic crossings.  Secret codes broken, secret identities kept.

 

Somehow Watson had found the strength of will to laugh when he should and gasp when the story required it.

 

It was ghastly.

 

            Holmes so beautiful and charming, perfect in every way,  was a monster non-the-less, bent on ripping out Watson's entrails and wrapping them around a tree like an ancient druid priest.

 

For one second, as the road took a sharp turn and the trunk of a large oak sprang into the beam of the headlights, Watson considered not turning the wheels. Let them crash in a sudden entanglement of glass and metal and fire.  He waited so long before making the curve that Holmes grew quiet for a moment and asked if Watson was “…quite all right? Maybe a little tired?”

 

Why hadn't he spoken? Why not just ask?

 

"Am I nothing to you but someone to use? Is there nothing else?"

 

And he was reminded of that day some years before when he'd come home from his rounds to find Holmes standing amongst his trunks.

 

"This is it.  It’s been tremendous; Watson, but I've solved my last case.  London can go on without me."

 

At that time Watson had been pole-axed by surprise. Uncertain as to what it meant. Was he to follow Holmes after he closed his practice? Would Holmes find a suitable new home for them? He even helped load the waiting cab, waiting for further instructions.

 

None were issued.

 

A handshake and a clasp on the shoulder. A brave smile. And his friend was gone.

 

The effect was like amputation. Sudden. Clean. Here's your peg leg and a cane.  Now learn to function without that limb.  He had been absolutely numb for weeks. Then came creeping sorrow and aching loneliness.  Somehow he rode it out. He survived. But it had taken years before he stopped expecting to find Holmes beside him every time he turned his head.

 

And now, after so long, to just receive a telegram,  -“Watson. Rent a car.  Meet me at the designated place and time.  Bring your revolver.”- as though the years had never passed.  The flood of emotions unmoored him. Nerves long since considered dead sparked again. The old doctor moved quickly, breathed deeply, his mind whirred as he struggled to hold his own in the white hot brilliance of Holmes intellect. 

Working with Holmes once more, the risk, the excitement, the fate of the nation- no, the fate of the entire world- hanging in the balance, felt like a hallucination.  It wasn’t until they arrived at Scotland Yard to turn over their prisoner and ran into a weathered, gray-haired Inspector Gregson, now the last of the old guard of officers that had once been the young guard when Watson first moved in to Baker Street, that the doctor finally felt that this wasn’t just another of his dreams. The ones that made him feel hollow and sour when he awoke. Gregson’s watchful eyes, now bracketed by lines of responsibilities, shone brightly in the radiance of his old mentor and he shook their hands and clapped their backs, and drinks were shared in his office. There were toasts, cigars, and for a few shining hours Watson’s world was in colour again.

 

He wrote up the case, an unexpected birth late in life, but this time in third person, to save himself the agony of  having to directly relive the emotions. 

 

And in spite of himself he had waited, desperately, for the offer…. “Watson, there’s an east wind coming, it will be cold and bitter, and a good many of us may wither before it….      Why don’t we ride out the storm together?”

 

Why hadn’t it come. 

 

He couldn't go back to grey. 

 

Through the half opened window came the whine of sirens. On the streets below people spoke in strident frightened tones as children were called inside and marshals cleared the roads with whistle blasts and shouts for "blackout". From the floor below he felt the vibrations of front windows being slammed shut.

 

He pulled the blackout curtain closed on his own window and before he switched off his lamp he opened his desk drawer and pulled out his now antique service revolver.  His eyes were drawn briefly to the hole in the barrel.  He turned it toward his face and stared into oblivion.  Lord knows he knew the taste of that barrel - as many times as he had placed it in his mouth - but he had never pulled the trigger.  As much as Holmes’ distance negated their relationship, an act such as that would have erased the meaning of their whole lives together. 

 

He dropped the gun in his pocket and pulled out his medical bag.  Inside he shoved his electric torch, and some extra bullets, then snapped it shut and switched the lamp off.

 

There was a curfew, but a doctor could still travel freely at any time, especially in war. There was also an absolute restriction on lights.  On moonless nights like this, the Zeppelins would float ghostlike across the London skies, searching for some target to hit.  The complete darkness of the blackout meant the behemoth airships had to drop their bombs blindly, frustrating their ability to hit factories or government offices with any accuracy.

 

It was Watson’s fervent wish to shoot one of these down.  It was Quixotic he knew, but if he stood in the middle of Hyde Park and turned his torch upwards, might he not lure one of the beasts to his area of the sky?  And if he discharged his pistol straight up at it, wasn’t there some possibility to puncture it?   And if he brought down a Zeppelin, wouldn’t Holmes hear of it? Might Watson’s sudden fame initiate an invite from the detective?  An offer to assist on another case? Maybe to stay indefinitely?

 

And if he missed the Zeppelin, but it didn’t miss him- standing alone in the middle of a field waving his electric torch, then wasn’t that all right too?


End file.
